Laughter on Records

Latest recorded batch of jokes from an old and a new hand at the humor game:

P: Mort Sahl takes as jaundiced a view of The New Frontier (Reprise) as he did of the old. He rakes Bobby Kennedy ("Little Brother is watching you"), Father Joe and Son Jack ("Judge Hardy and Andy"), and the crowds that flock to see Jack Kennedy every Sunday morning: "One of the disadvantages of his new job is that he has to get up and go to church." Kennedy's sponsored television broadcasts, says Sahl, put him into a peculiar predicament. "May I mention the United States?" the President asks his toothpaste sponsor. "No. That's a plug." Idly reflecting that Kennedy is as handsome as a movie star, Sahl pictures him cast as the lead in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, "pursued across Mount Rushmore by the head of the House Rules Committee. There'd be good shots of Kennedy climbing on his own face."

P: Harrison Baker, a newcomer from San Francisco who bills himself The Last of the Well Comedians (RCA Victor), is mildly notable because he is totally out of the new-comedian pattern, instead goes back a long way to imitate Bob Hope, with uneven results that are often funny. Beginning with the Pentagon ("a building that has five sides--on almost every issue"), Baker discusses the cold war in a deadpan style. Joseph Kennedy's way to solve the Cuban problem, he says, is to buy Cuba and sink it. Of the leading figures in the Congo crisis, Baker moans: "I don't know whether I'm reading names or eye charts." Baker is puzzled by the space race. That Russia was first to send a cosmonaut into space does not unduly dismay Baker. "We may not be the first to get a rocket to the moon," he says, "but we'll be the first to send foreign aid." Not the least of the enticements of space travel, Baker claims, is the fact that women on Mars have bosoms on their backs. "It doesn't make them any more attractive, but it makes it a lot easier for dancing."

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